So I played several games of backgammon the other night. I won most of the games. I should have won the entire time. I am recalling how the one(s) I lost happened because I was being too careful. And the ones I won were because I just went for it and took risks.

Why would you want to work so hard if you couldn’t keep what you worked so hard for? ~Jane

“The harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.” Thomas Paine

“In order to stimulate growth there has to be an incentive associated with the risk, and that incentive is typically the generation of more funds.”

3 More Progressive Lies via R. Reich

“A blog by Robert Reich caught my attention. Reich has an impressive resume as he was a former Secretary of Labor under the Clinton Administration and was a member of the Ford and Carter administration who currently serves as the ‘Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy’ at the University of California, Berkley. Nonetheless, the man couldn’t be more wrong about the economy. I picked my three favorite headlines from his blog post and pointed out the ignorance of his progressive statements.” J. Smiles

#1 – “Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else. Baloney.”

Tax cuts for the rich, or everyone, allows individuals to keep the money they earn, regardless of their income level. This allows individuals to have more financial security as they accumulate money at a faster rate – this security encourages them to purchase more goods and services, thus boosting the economy. If you allow the rich to have more money they will take it a step further and invest creating more jobs and therefore taxpayers – increasing the amount of revenue the government, will generate. The more money people (at any income level) earn, the more willing they are to purchase products and/or invest in future economy possibilities. The benefit of lower taxes improves the lives of people at EVERY LEVEL, not just the rich and allows for a greater chance for class mobility in the populous.

#2 – “Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth. False.”

This is my favorite – because it’s by far the most untrue. It directly correlates with number one, but deserves its own attention because increasing taxes hurts the economy. The less benefit there is to gain from an investment, the less incentive there is to invest. In order to stimulate growth there has to be an incentive associated with the risk, and that incentive is typically the generation of more funds.

The government has never, under any circumstance, jump-started the economy. Many will cite the Great Depression era as a rebuttal to this statement, but a closer examination shows this to be false. The origin of the great depression was stimulated not only by the influence of European Economists, but also by the artificial influence of increased regulations and rising tax rates.

Prior to the great depression there was a shorter depression that occurred in 1920 that only lasted 18 months, but was quickly averted. Wilson slowly raised the rates on the wealthiest Americans to 73% and began a movement towards massive regulations of business, which slowed the possibility for business to grow. These high end rates combined with stagnating regulations forced business to drastically slow production and people stopped investing, but this crisis was headed off as Harding and Coolidge took office and dropped the top rates to 25% and greatly reduced regulation on business. This produced the roaring the 20’s.

Hoover took office and began implementing progressive regulation. This regulation slowed business, which forced Hoover to raise taxes, and then he raised them again, and again, and then found himself as a direct influence in the Great Depression.

Markets will accommodate higher taxes rates when permitted to correct themselves without excessive regulations and higher profit margins; however, the more regulation placed on the markets the heavier the burden becomes – leading to “stagflation”, which occurred in the 1970’s under the Carter Administration. How was this fixed? By Ronald Regan and economic deregulation.

Obviously, you cannot cut all taxes and expect the government to operate. Some taxes are necessary; there is a point at which cutting taxes does nothing for the economy. Luckily, for us that the current tax rate forces a two parent middle class family making a combined $75,000 a year has to pay a quarter of their income to the government. I think that their kids would probably want that money to go to college on. Wait, I forgot the government now controls all loans to students, which they charge interest on, thus making them more money – and placing the future generation firmly in their pocket. Don’t be fooled by progressive lies, trickledown economics does work and has improved the lives of millions of Americans in the past, not just the rich.

#3 – “Cutting the budget deficit now is more important than boosting the economy. Untrue.”

This is just an asinine statement. Cutting the budget would boost the economy. Less money would be taken out of the pockets of the people who earned it. The government would spend less, allowing more money to be spent in the economy. Honestly, the budget deficit is the seminal question of our time period. We must fix the budget, we must reign in government spending, and we must examine closely how government spends money.

Or we could be like the progressives, ignore the deficit, and pass a health care law that is going to add 1.5 trillion dollars to the deficit in the next decade.

Progressive mindsets are boggling. How one can think we can run a Robin Hood government is beyond logical. Is there probably a little bit of both necessary to make a successful economy? Yes. But too much of anything is bad and currently we have too much progressivism in America.

‎”My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” Karl Marx, Father of Communism

The breaking down of morality and the Left’s desire to dethrone God is a very important stratagem for the Communist movement. Through the media and Hollywood, our government and schools, low morality is on constant display for the world to see and for our children to “idolize” and accept as the “norm.”

5 Ways Liberalism Destroys Virtue

The more completely a person, group, or organization embraces liberalism, the less virtuous it becomes. It’s almost like a mental sickness in that respect. People or groups who are lightly infected can soldier on without having it eat them alive. However, the deeper the sickness goes, the more it changes them. Eventually the liberal disease inside of people can grow so much that it warps their morals, their religious beliefs, and their way of thinking until they can no longer tell right and wrong. This destruction of virtue is a natural consequence of the fundamental beliefs that go along with liberalism.

5) “When one becomes a liberal, he or she pretends to advocate tolerance, equality and peace, but hilariously, they’re doing so for purely selfish reasons. It’s the human equivalent of a puppy dog’s face: an evolutionary tool designed to enhance survival, reproductive value and status. In short, liberalism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler, than saying something like, ‘please lower my taxes.’” — Greg Gutfeld

Doing the right thing is often tough. It’s hard to take money you could use yourself and give it to charity. It’s difficult to hold to a position that you think is best for the country even though some people will think it’s “mean.” It takes self-denial to ask that the government spend less today so that future generations will still be able to enjoy the American Dream.

Liberals don’t have that sort of moral courage. They advocate giving away other people’s money and call it being charitable. They take positions that are terrible for the country because they’re afraid of criticism and call it bravery. They’re willing to sell future generations of Americans into debt bondage so they can have a little more comfort now and they pat themselves on the back for their compassionate “investments.”

Liberals aren’t actually charitable, courageous, or compassionate; they just claim to be those things by virtue of the fact that they’re liberal. In fact, that’s one of the major selling points of liberalism: being able to think of yourself as moral and good without the trials and sacrifice that go along with actually being moral and good.

4) “There are no bad guys on the left. There are only people who’ve been driven to desperation by conservative evil.” — Allahpundit

Liberals begin with the proposition that conservatives are unwitting dupes at best and evil at worst while other liberals are on the side of the angels. This leads them to excuse just about any and every behavior from killing cops (Muhammad Abdul Jamal), to terrorist bombings (Bill Ayers), to treason (Jane Fonda) as long as the perpetrator has the right beliefs and is useful to the movement. When you think that the only real crime is disagreeing with your ideology, you can make a hero out of a drunken, disreputable coward who left a woman to die in a tidal pool or even come up with justifications for why it’s fine for the Department of Justice to help Mexican cartels get weapons they used to kill more than 300 people as part of some misguided political stunt to encourage gun control.

3) “Liberals have created, and the minority leadership has exploited, a community of dependent people, unaware of the true route to prosperity and happiness: self-reliance and self-investment. Instead, people are told that America is unjust, unfair, and full of disadvantages. They are told that their only hope is for government to fix their problems. What has happened is that generations of people have bought into this nonsense and as a result have remained hopelessly mired in poverty and despair — because the promised solutions don’t work. And they will never work — they never have.” — Rush Limbaugh

Individuality is a necessary condition of morality. When you embrace tribalism based on race, gender, and sexual orientation as the Left does, you inevitably end up embracing a tribal mentality as well. Everyone in your tribe is on “your side” and other people are viewed as “enemies.” Most people don’t apply the same ethical standards to their enemies as they do to their tribe. That’s why we’re fine with sending Predator Drones to kill terrorists in Pakistan, but we would riot in the street if the same policy were put in place to target people accused of murder in New Jersey. The more liberals split us into groups, the more hatred and situational ethics inevitably occur as a result.

2) “Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. It leads the modern liberal to invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Very simply if nothing is to be recognized as better or worse than anything else then success is de facto unjust.

There is no explanation for success if nothing is better than anything else and the greater the success the greater the injustice. Conversely and for the same reason, failure is de facto proof of victimization and the greater the failure, the greater the proof of the victim is, or the greater the victimization.” — Evan Sayet

For the most part, success isn’t random. Most rich people deserve their wealth just as poor people deserve their poverty. There’s a reason a bank CEO is where he is and a dirty hippy with empty pockets is impotently protesting him in the street. Most people who fail deserve to be failing just as most people who succeed deserve to be succeeding. There is such a thing as right and wrong and, no, there isn’t a different standard depending on whether you’re white or black, Israeli or Palestinian, straight or gay, liberal or conservative. Liberals can’t bear to be “mean” to people who are losing at life by telling them that truth; so they’d rather pretend there are no rules, no standards, and no morals that matter. Once you embrace that kind of indiscriminateness, there is no degeneracy from Palestinian suicide bombers to Occupy Movement rapes that you will not excuse under the right circumstances.

1) “That is one reason ‘feelings’ and ‘compassion’ are two of the most often used liberal terms. ‘Character’ is no longer a liberal word because it implies self-restraint. ‘Good and evil’ are not liberal words either as they imply a moral standard beyond one’s feelings. In assessing what position to take on moral or social questions, the liberal asks him or herself, ‘How do I feel about it?’ or ‘How do I show the most compassion?’ — not ‘What is right?’ or ‘What is wrong?’ For the liberal, right and wrong are dismissed as unknowable, and every person chooses his or her own morality.” — Dennis Prager

Liberals are completely indifferent to whether the programs they advocate work or not. It’s all about how they make them feel. A liberal will prefer a completely non-functional government program that makes them feel good about themselves over a program that works, but doesn’t inflate their egos, 10 times out of 10. The same goes for morality. The standard isn’t, “Is it right or is it wrong?” — it’s whether it makes them feel nice or mean. “Nice and wrong” is always preferable to “right and mean.” As most non-liberals over the age of 12 have long since discovered, feelings are an extremely poor replacement for logic, decency, and common sense.

So Rodney King has died over the weekend and the comments I see flying around about his death have been twofold. On the one hand, people are filled with hate and spite calling the recently deceased what they will. On the other hand, bleeding hearted liberals who cannot stand to call anybody “terrible,” especially when they can relate to them, put on their holier-than-thou facade and reprimand the former. I know nothing about this man nor could I care less, but seeing comments by so many people about his death just makes me wonder about this phenomenon.

Why is it when people die, we suddenly have to respect them and talk about them as if they were the best thing that ever happened to mankind? Oftentimes, this type of rhetoric come from the very same people who disrespected them when they were alive. I have sat through more funerals and wakes than I care to recall and have listened to people lie in the house of God or listened to people finally “talk well” of the deceased at their wakes, all the while carrying an arrogant countenance of feigned piety. My mother’s funeral and wake was exactly like this. Over the years, I heard about my mother’s relatives mistreating her or talking ill of her, year after year, day after day. The treatment that she received from her own relatives caused her so much sadness and heartache that she frequently shared them with me with endless tears and painfully into the nights. As a result, I hated attending family events. I had no desire to hear these people talk about my mother much less look at them. I would go to family gatherings for my mother’s sake because I loved her, but I certainly hated being there. How could I ignore the sorrow that she felt because of the relentless abuse she received from her own family? These people were her cousins, nieces or sisters or other relatives. I listened to my mother’s stories, watched her wipe away tears and never would I interrupt, but inside I felt the sadness that she felt.

So when I lost my mother to cancer, the effects of the loss remain inexplicable and still very painful. It changed the woman that I was from being one of the masses to becoming one of the “displaced.” Suddenly, I no longer fit into the world. My list of priorities was turned upside-down. I could no longer relate to the superficial material world that focused on image and wealth. I would spend my birthdays alone because it was then that I missed her the most. Yet, the world went on: The sun shone, the rain fell, people laughed and people cried. It was almost as if someone took a pencil and erased her. The world was still here, it had not changed, but my mother was gone. I had lost my best friend, my mother and my confidante.

So within a week’s time after her death, I had to plan a funeral, a wake and a reception and be surrounded by the very people who in life despised my mother, but now in death, their smug sanctimony and hypocrisy would be on display not only for the world to see, but certainly also very visible to me.

My siblings and I swore not to wear black at her funeral or wake because she had not wanted us to mourn her death, but rather rejoice that she was joining our Father in Heaven. My mother’s wake was in the hot summer month of July. I wore a classic white summer dress, shoulder-less and cut above the knees. Tan from the summer, it would have been a dress that she would have loved on me. I had worn it for her. Within ten minutes, however, we were fiercely reprimanded by my Aunt who along with her family were draped in all black. We were scolded for not “showing respect.” I bit my tongue. This woman was one who always spoke horribly about my mother. What does she know about what my mother wanted or respect towards her for that matter? Silently, I disregarded and ignored her and went about attending to the matters at hand. All the while, unable to forget or shake off the fact that my mother’s dead body was in an open casket a stone’s throw away.

As I walked around the room, I would catch snippets of conservations people had amongst themselves and later was told about “rumors” (instigated by my very own sisters) that were going around. Words about how great my mother was, how sweet she was, and how horrible her children were to each other (particularly, my little brother and me and the way we were dressed and how we were not fair to our other siblings). Again, I ignored their petty and foolish words and I couldn’t help but think, why couldn’t they have been kind to my mother when she was alive? When it really mattered. And to be at her wake with her body close by while spouting out lies and hypocrisy. Blood may be thicker than water, but not for me. The only thing that really matters is truth and there is nothing more true than hypocrisy in death.

Never thought I’d see the day that liberals and Democrats would see the light and the error of their Party’s ways and leave in droves to join conservatives. We welcome them with open arms. Finally, it seems, common sense is returning to our country and to those who have been led astray by the radical left and their twisted agenda. No longer are people seeming to be asleep and content with watching their country degrade and be destroyed by the communists who have infiltrated every corner of American life. From the educational process to government and high political office to the judicial system and into the public unions. Corruption has spread like wildfire, a disease, adversely affecting the very core fibers that have made our country great. Communism and its vile rule will hopefully be snuffed out in the highly-anticipated November election.. or at least be a definitive and important step towards its annihilation. Yet, even with all the reports from so many news sources that say otherwise, President Obama maintains that, “the American people generally agree with our vision.” What American people, Mr. President? Are these people composite people? like the composite girlfriend in your book, “Dreams from my Father?” or do you continue to ignore her citizenry as you have done throughout your entire presidency? Keep your blinders on, Mr. President, and only see what you want to see and believe what you want to believe because November will be here in no time. If the 2010 election results and the failed recall of Gov. Scott Walker didn’t teach you anything, American voices will be heard. And it will be a great day for America indeed.

So last night as I listened to excerpts of the Sandusky trial and testimony of the now grown man and the abuse he endured under Sandusky, the chill that went up my spine gave me an icy shudder that seemed to move through every fiber of my being, and it reminded me of my own experience as a 3 year old little girl at the hands of a relative (though, thank God, that even at that age, I knew when something was wrong and I ran away from the “monster”).

Later, I listened to Dr. Savage’s radio show and was absolutely mesmerized by the callers that flooded his telephone lines. They were, for once, anonymously opening up about the abuse they suffered as children at the hands of relatives and other mature and young adults. I couldn’t help but cry. Savage is correct. Child abuse is one of the most underreported crimes in the country. Most people, usually men (though many women too), are afraid to report their abuse for fear of being ridiculed, appearing weak, lack of confidence in the system along with many other reasons. So they often suppress memories which undoubtedly come back to haunt them in later years. At one point, an 82 year old man got on the phone with Dr. Savage and told him how he had been abused when he was 10 years old by a male family friend and that he had never spoken of it before.. until now, 72 years later. As a result, he has never been able to have a solid relationship with any woman. And so never had any children. Another man, now in his 50s, suffered abuse when he was also 10 years old at the hands of a grown man. Today, he is gay. He blames being gay on the abuse and that he had been addicted to an “underground sex lifestyle” all his life. I could hear the sadness in his voice.. a deep tragic sadness. Dr. Savage asked him if he had regrets about not having had a family, “Yes, very much so,” he said, “being gay is a lonely life.” Again, I could not hold back the tears.

The Sandusky trial brings sadness for many people; the repressed feelings are resurfacing and the tormented emotions have returned, for me included. I could never think of this relative of mine without wanting to vomit. Sandusky and people like him should be granted the justice that they deserve. Nothing can ever bring back the innocence that he and people like him have robbed from so many children.. and it resonates deeply within me because I too never told anyone in my family, until now. Because if they are reading this then they already know.